Who is Laocoön? This sculpture depicts a scene from the Roman poet Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 BCE) describing the death of the Trojan priest of Apollo, Laocoön, and his two sons. According to the epic poem, when the Greeks delivered the Trojan Horse to the gates of the city of Troy in the hope of breaching their defenses, Laocoön attempted to warn the Trojans of the ruse: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” The goddess Athena, who sided with the Greeks, sent giant sea serpents to kill Laocoön and his sons for their interference. FIGURE 1. Laocoön, 1st century CE, Roman, marble. Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican City. The Original Sculpture and Its Rediscovery The 1st-century CE marble sculpture in the Vatican Museum (Fig. 1) was made for a wealthy Roman patron and is traditionally attributed to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus after a bronze original. Some scholars argue, however, It was recorded as being in the palace of the Emperor Titus in the late 1st that it was made by a Roman century CE. With its dynamic, asymmetrical composition, strained muscles, sculptor or sculptors rather than expressive facial features, diagonal thrust, heightened tension, and thick locks the Rhodian artists. of hair, the Laocoön exemplifies the Hellenistic style. In 1506 the sculptural group was discovered while The sculpture was looted by Napoleon in 1798 during the excavating for a well in a vineyard on the Esquiline Italian campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars. While Hill in Rome. The right arm of the central figure was it was in France, the restored sections were removed and missing. Learning of the discovery, and fascinated replaced with new parts. The sculpture was returned to Rome by ancient art and culture, Pope Julius II purchased in 1816 after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. the sculpture and displayed it in the Belvedere In 1906 an archaeologist saw a marble fragment of an arm in Court garden with other similar ancient works in his a builder’s yard in Rome. The fragment came from the same collection. Contemporary artists were excited to hear vineyard as the larger group. Speculating that it may be the of the find and rushed to see it. Pope Julius convened Laocoön’s missing arm, he purchased the piece and gave it to a group of them, led by Raphael, to propose how the the Vatican Museum. Finally, in 1960, conservators found the missing arm should be replaced. After much debate, fragment in storage, and after much study determined that they decided that the arm should be outstretched over it matched the marble and the original break of the Laocoön, the priest’s head. Michelangelo dissented and proposed proving that Michelangelo had been right about the position instead that the arm should be bent at the elbow. of the arm. This is the restoration that we see now on the original sculpture in Vatican City. Later interpretations of the Laocoön After its discovery in 1506, the Laocoön group became a source of inspiration and a model for artists across Europe; and patrons (other than Napoleon) who could not have the original, commissioned copies for their own collections. Baccio Bandinelli completed a marble copy in 1525 for Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (later Pope Clement VII) who sent it to the Uffizi in Florence. Another bronze cast by Francesco Primaticcio, now in the Louvre, was made for the French king, Francis I, for his château at Fontainbleau in 1543. Prints of the ancient sculpture by Giovanni Antonio da Brescia (ca. 1506–08), Marco Dente (1515–27), Nicolas Beatrizet (1545–70) (Fig. 2), Pieter Perret (1581), and Jacques de Gheyn III (1619), among others, circulated throughout Europe, extending the sculpture’s influence and renown. The sculpture was even subject to caricature in a print attributed to Nicolo Boldrini (ca. 1520–60) after Titian (Fig. 3) and reissued by the French collector Pierre Mariette in the eighteenth century. Artists studying in Rome—Ambrogio Giovanni Figino, Peter Paul Rubens, Edme Bouchardon, George Romney, and William Blake, among many others—made the requisite visit to the papal collections to sketch after antique sculptures there, including the famous Laocoön (Fig. 4). TheLaocoön group was an icon of ancient art, a standard part of all artists’ visual vocabulary, and a monument familiar to any educated person (Fig. 5). FIGURE 2. Nicolas Beatrizet (French, 1507– ca. 1565) Laocoön, engraving on laid paper, 19.69 x 12.99 inches. Snite Museum of Art: Acquired with funds provided by the Estate of Edith and Dr. Paul J. Vignos Jr. ’41, 2016.012. FIGURE 3. Caricature of the Laocoön, after Boldrini, after Titian, ca. 1550–1600 engraving, published by Pierre Mariette, 9 x 13.1 inches. British Museum, London, 1902,1213.1. FIGURE 4. Ambrogio Giovanni Figino (Italian, 1548–1608), Studies of Heads after the Laocoön, ca. 1577, black chalk on blue paper, 9.13 x 7.25 inches. Snite Museum of Art: Gift of John D. Reilly ’63, 2014.061.258. FIGURE 5. Unknown artist, The Private Sitting Room of Sir Thos. Lawrence, 1830, etching and aquatint on chine collé, 13 x 16.89 inches. British Museum, London. Unknown artist, probably Italian, Laocoön and His Sons, 18th century?, marble, 62.25 x 53.75 x 27.25 inches. Snite Museum of Art: On loan from Michael and Susie McLoughlin, L2016.016 This slightly smaller copy of theLaocoön sculpture—the original is about 82 × 64 × 44 inches—has been dated to between 1650 and 1780 based on evidence of the kind of tools used to make the sculpture and on the type of marble. The precision of the details suggests the use of carving tools that were developed after 1650. Drill marks in the crevices of this sculpture (at the back of the sculpture, see the channels between the locks of hair) signal that a pointing machine was not used to determine how deep the sculptor should carve. Instead, drills were used to explore the depths of the block. Pointing machines were invented in 1775 and used widely after 1780, after which time these telltale holes disappear from sculptures entirely. The gray, matte quality of the marble from which this sculpture was made was depleted by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Later marble sculptures, such as the Bust of Marie Antoinette on display nearby, are whiter and have a higher sheen. The copy of theLaocoön on view here was probably made for a wealthy collector’s private home and advertised the owner’s superior taste and classical education. The object of art is pleasure, and pleasure is not indispensable. Laocoön in the Eighteenth Century In the eighteenth-century intellectuals’ devotion to antiquity, the Laocoön loomed large in the codification of good taste. In his illustrated treatise, The Analysis of Beauty of 1753, British artist William Hogarth used the ancient sculpture as an illustration of his principle of simplicity and variety, which finds its perfect form in the pyramid (Fig. 6). Of the monument, he wrote: The authors . ofas fine a group of figures in sculpture as ever was made either by ancients or moderns, (I mean Laocoön and his two sons) chose to be guilty of the absurdity of making the sons of half the father’s size. rather than not bring their composition within the boundary of a pyramid. Thus, if a judicious workman were employed to make a case of wood, for preserving it from the injuries of the weather, or for the convenience of carriage, he would soon find, by his eye, the whole composition would readily fit, and easily be packed up, in one of a pyramidal form. The sculpture was shipped to the Snite Museum in a rectangular crate, not a pyramidal form, and it weighs 2,500 lbs. It took five men and a device called a gantry (horizontal crane) to lift it into place. FIGURE 6. William Hogarth (British, 1697–1764), Analysis of Beauty, Plate I, 1753, engraving, 17 x 21 inches. Snite Museum of Art: Gift of Mr. S. Herman Klarsfeld, 1975.095.007. To underscore the point, he placed the Laocoön (note Despite the violence of the narrative, he wrote, the artists its reversed position) in the center of the background had captured a moment of balance and had elevated of Plate 1 and erected a scaffold in the shape of a nature to the ideal. “TheLaocoön expresses pain and pyramid. French writers, too, cited it as a paradigm of distress in the highest degree, but in a still grander and correct proportions in their essay on Dessein (Design or nobler sense than in nature.” Drawing) for the Encyclopédie in 1762–77 (Fig. 7). In An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry written Enlightenment philosophers looked to the Laocoön in in 1766, Gotthold Lessing disagreed with Winckelmann’s forming their aesthetic theories. German archaeologist characterization of the Laocoön as noble simplicity and Johann Joachim Winckelmann wrote his seminal treatise, quiet grandeur. Lessing noted the difference between Reflections on the paintings and sculpture of the Greeks, the poets’ words which describe a scene of agony filled in 1755. Winckelmann championed Greek art over with screams and painful spasms and the artist’s Roman art, identifying evolutionary stages for stylistic subdued portrayal of it. According to Lessing, the development, such as archaic, classical, and Hellenistic. artists deliberately chose not to depict the agonized He used the Laocoön as an example of classical harmony. soul and to deviate from the literary description. Why? “The object of art is pleasure, and pleasure is not indispensable,” he argued. Pain and beauty were not compatible.